Science and Culture

copyright 2017 Jennifer Coopersmith

The historian of science, Henry Guerlac, wrote that science and mathematics were the chief cultural products of the French Revolution. If someone doesn’t know who painted the Mona Lisa, or when the French Revolution occurred, we consider them to be uncultured, but what if they know nothing of Newton’s Laws or the Laws of Thermodynamics?

The English political philosopher, John Gray, is famous for saying that progress is a myth. His view has some merit: the poor are still with us, terrible wars are still waged, the methods of science are often applied falsely (and used to draw banal conclusions and give them a phoney respectability (e.g. IQ tests)).

However, when it comes to the physical sciences, Gray misses the point. The changes brought in are not merely the discovery of gadgets, but world-changing advances (the steam engine, electricity generation, antibiotics, etc.). But, even more than new technology, the ‘exact sciences’ have changed the world-view: the Earth is no longer the centre of the universe; humans are related to apes; space and time are not independent of each other or of the masses within; and so on.

Even though the laws of science are not absolutely true – they are always subject to revision in the future – yet, taken as a whole, science is progressive, and the laws of science are not as provisional as all that. For example, we may consider the viewing of the football world finals as a massive ‘experiment’ involving a billion televisions/computer screens around the world. Is the fact that the billions of viewers see the same thing, and in great detail (22 players, a football pitch, a ball, second by second, for 90 minutes) a coincidence, or can we say that we know something (quantum mechanics, relativity theory, the laws of transmission of electromagnetic signals, and so on)?

As the centuries go by, even with setbacks and dark ages, science advances, and we end up having more and more knowledge – we are more and more highly cultured.